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...... i started to explain the purpose of the work i was helping with, between sydney uni and melb uni high energy physics departments



the point of the particle detector that melb uni built with the help of the syd uni dept was to configure the particle accelerator for the subsequent BELLE detector



configure = adjust the focusing magnets around the accelerator ring, so that the particle pulses would be focussed into the ideal point inside the detector



so the little detector (BEAST) was installed in the particle beam, to record what happens while the focusing tests were performed



the BELLE experiment was undertaken to expand the "standard model" of particle interactions



to investigate one particular collision, which has a bearing on the future evolution of the universe - the research has an impact on cosmology, because estimating the mass/energy of the universe would mean that the age of the universe can be estimated, and whether the expansion will be without limit, it eventually plateaus logartithmically to a static state, or the xpansion stops and reverses into a big crunch



something called CP violation is the cause of why we live in a universe of matter, not antimatter



a slight increase in matter, from CP violation, meant that when the universe cooled after the big bang, and after matter combined with antimatter, a small majority of matter was left behind to form the universe that we observe today



anti matter are protons, neutron and electrons with opposite charge and parity (CP) numbers



all particle interections are "invariant" (reversible) when one changes C (charge) for Cbar (anticharge), P for Pbar (opposite parity) and T for Tbar (reverse time direction)



like billiard balls on a pool table you can hit them forward or backwards



when you take pair combnations like changing CP for Cbar Pbar do you find interactions that can only go "one way"



so the annihilation of matter/antimatter at the beginning of the universe favoured matter over anitmatter because a one way interaction was involved (between K mesons and anti K mesons)

- which is the point of the BELLE experiment